Advertising forms an important part of broadcast programming including broadcast video (e.g., television), radio, and printed media. Advertising management systems are distributed systems where local entities create and manage advertiser and agency content and records. Such systems often possess a large number of duplicate advertiser and agency records in their database(s). Integrating such distributed systems into an enterprise environment can create duplicate entries, compatibility issues, connection difficulties, redundancy issues, and other significant inefficiencies.
Many distributed and disconnected legacy systems utilized by media outlets typically include a large number of duplicate advertiser and agency records. One of the main problems associated with conventional techniques for managing such records is the lack of effective tools for scoring, evaluating, and comparing data with respect to a single enterprise. For example, consider a user belonging to a market associated with an enterprise that creates a new advertiser named ‘Baja Fresh’ and another user who belongs to another market associated with the same enterprise creates a new advertiser ‘Baja Grill’ with a slight variation in the name (i.e., “Baja”). Technically, both these advertiser names refer to the same master advertiser, which is ‘Baja Fresh’. Hence, it is important to have a single instance of an advertiser and not multiple duplicates for management and reporting purposes. Another problem associated with conventional advertising techniques involves management and reporting of large amounts of data by local users, which is time consuming and inefficient.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved method and system for managing media advertising enterprise data. A need also exists for an improved matching process to accurately match similar records, as described in greater detail herein.